I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time. Down in lower Kittitas County, in almost every direction you look there are windmills. Watching the giant white wind towers go up like a fence around the Kittitas Valley has been disconcerting, to say the least. I used to rant about every cell tower that went up on some prominent location and then got used to that visual insult. Now there are hundreds of wind towers everywhere and I’m boggled by the visually intrusive monstrosities every time I journey east. They are everywhere now, reminding me of the Martian machines striding across the landscape in “War of the Worlds”.
In fact I don’t have to go east, really. On a clear day and with low power bincoculars, the towers can be seen from the crest of the Cascade Mountains.
One of the things I used to love about Kittitas County was the sweeping vistas of prairie and sky, mountains and clouds. The feeling of wildness. Now there’s this visual white picket fence being built around us so that we can no longer enjoy clear views. Some would say that scenery takes second place to energy needs. In this case, the energy is going to California, so we in essence become a subservient energy factory for the folks down south.
The windmills are, to my mind, another emblem of the Technisocial Wave washing back at us from the West Coast, filling the valleys and capping the ridges with homes, roads, traffic, mechanical and electronic incrustations, wiping out more of the local nature that many long-term residents value. Local nature is being whittled away…no, rather it’s being hacked away, piece by piece. We have been discovered here, and a flag claiming ownership has been planted. A flag with dollar signs on it.
Windmill farms, housing tracts, resorts, golf courses, multi-million dollar homes, new roads, bigger freeways, more traffic…is this what we want here? And even if it isn’t, is there anything we can do about it? It doesn’t seem that there is. This relentless wave will probably continue until our once beautiful and peaceful county is converted to the type of place that people moved here to get away from. I know that sounds pessimistic, but all my life I’ve watched this process occurring almost everywhere and seen how little our culture as a whole values the things that it destroys.
J.R. Herman 